Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Giving and Saving

Last week I shared this quilt with you. Mom and I cut this and 2 other kits from my fabric stash to make quilt kits. We used my Go! Tumbler die and cut 200 tumblers for each quilt (13 tumblers per row and 15 rows). I think it makes a great quilt for a charity quilt. 

Today I posted at 3 Creative Studios about how I deal with news stress like the events in Japan. I have to accept that I can only do so much (donate money) to help those who are suffering. But I can use my "worry energy" in other ways to help people close to home. After all, there is always someone in need.

I decided that I would cut 4 more of these kits. Two for my Guild Chapter to sew on their community service sewing day in May and two for another group where I donate a lot of my scrap quilting fabrics. They make quilts for local, state and international charities.

The first step was to pick fabric and cut tumbler blocks. The fabrics for this kit came mostly from a single fabric line. I bought the fat quarter set at a quilt show several years ago. It has lots of bright, happy colors. You can get 6 tumbler blocks from a fat quarter. I fold and cut the fat quarter so that there is a wide middle strip left over. From those I cut 2.25" strips that they can piece together for the binding. All of this goes in a Ziplock bag for the kit. 

But there are a TON of scrap pieces left from one of these kit cutting sessions.

Since I bought the fabrics, I certainly liked them so I decided on a small project for msyelf. I sewed some of the scraps into long rows, added some hand dyed fabrics and made 4 placemats! That's a surprise, isn't it?

I already had 4 hand dyed napkins that matched.

I wanted to have some fun with the quilting. I chalked lines across the quilt for every seam line in the strip section and then quilted over the chalked lines with variegated thread. I really like these a lot and I'm glad to have a little project for myself to remind me of the fabrics.

But there were more scraps!

I pulled out the Go! Value die and cut as many 4.5" and 2.5" squares as I could. I will give these to one of the sewing groups too.

I sewed every leftover sewable piece together into 12 5.5" crumb blocks and then took every other bit of scrap and made them into 2 confetti sheets. I did these confetti sheets on a piece of old fabric and decided to make these with some thought and planning. I used all of the purple, red and dark blue pieces on an 18" square and the yellow, green and light blue on a 9 x 18 peice of fabric. For the moment they are fused in layers with Mistyfuse with a layer of tulle fused on top. Once I come up with a project I will do some decorative stitching to quilt the layers together. By doing these on fabric, instead of stiff interfacing, I have more options for how I uses these sheets later.

I don't know what I will do with the crumb blocks yet either, but at least they are not in the trash!

On to the next set of fabrics! I hope I will have a noticeable dent in my stash when these 4 kits are done.

How to make a shelter pet pad

In the previous post I showed how I make stuffed pet beds. I make them from small bits of batting and trimmed parts of quilts that I chop into small pieces. I also occasionally have large quilted samples. I don't want to cut those up so I make them into pet pads. These turn into random sizes that are totally dependent on the size of the quilted sample. I assume most of these are for small dogs and cats.

 

This is a quilted samples that I won as a door prize in a Nichole Webb class a few years ago. It's not that I don't appreciate her beautiful work but sometimes I need to declutter and today was one of those times!

Spread the piece put flat and fold it into quarters. I match up the edges as best I can but I don't bother to trim it.

 

Stitch the two cut sides together leaving one edge (the first folded edge) open.

 

This is the open edge. It's important that the open edge be a folded edge to make this construction super fast. Turn the pad inside out. )Sometimes you might have to make a wider seam allowance if all of the raw edges were not caught in the original stitching.) Poke out the corner as much as possible.

 

Stitch the opening closed with a topstitch through all layers (it's the bottom edge in the photo) and then stitch a couple of rows of stitching through all layers to hold it all together.

I know, it's not pretty but the pet will not care. For me, these have to be fast and get rid of my "trash" easily to make it worth my time.

These 4 beds and 3 pads are going to one of my coworkers tomorrow. She works with one of our local shelters. That's a lot of bulk removed from my sewing room!

How to make a shelter dog bed from scraps

I started making these dog beds for a local rescue shelter  several years ago. To be honest, it wasn't for the dogs as much as it was a way to use up sewing room scraps. I did a tutorial for these a couple of years ago but the photos weren't very good. I though it was time to re-write the tutorial. Following this post I will have a tutorial for a pet pad. I make the pet pads from large quilted samples.

Keep in mind that these are functional, they are not pretty! I use any fabric that I get free and I don't care at all about thread color, shape or accuracy.

For the pet bed you need:

• some remnant heavy fabric. Decorator fabrics are great
• thread - not your Masterpiece or Bottom Line. Heavier threads are better and this is a great time to use up partial bobbins. I do not worry about thread colors. Dogs are color blind.
• stuffing: chopped up batting and fabric, fleece and stuffing from old bed pillows. Stuffing from bed pillows helps to keep the weight somewhat under control. I cut up the batting and fleece bits into something close to 2" chunks.

Here's my bag of scraps that I have been saving. I chop up batting as soon as I trim a quilt and store it in this bag in the corner of my sewing room. I have a whole drawer of these lovely decorator fabrics that someone gave me. Just mention it at a Guild meeting and someone will show up with a bag of the stuff for free!

 

I make my dog beds large since most shelter dogs are large dogs. If I fold the fabric on the diagonal and cut near that folded edge I wind up with a dog bed that is about 26" square. You can make them any size you want.

 

Fold the fabric right sides together and stitch two sides closed, leaving one edge open. I don't worry about seam allowance but usually make it a bit wider than 1/4". Turn the bed right side out.

 

For a 26" dog bed, I create 3 stuffing channels. To create the channels, stitch 2 seams through both layers perpendicular to the open edge. They are illustrated here by the 2 green lines. Stitch these from the bottom of the bed and STOP about 1" FROM THE TOP EDGE.

 

Draw two line across the width of the pet bed, parallel to the open edge. I spaced them about 8.5" apart on a 26" bed.  These are sewing guidelines to create the stuffed cells.

 

Grab fist fulls of stuffing and start stuffing the channels. Do them one at a time and only stuff to that first drawn line. Stuff them VERY FULL. I let not-our-dog-Stanley use one of these beds this past winter and learned that they flatten out a lot if they are not stuffed really tight.

 

Pin the channel closed as you stuff it. You can see in this photo how tight the bed is stuffed.  I usually pin the corners of the cell first and keep stuffing as I pin toward the center of the cell. The other thing to keep in mind is the direction of your pins. I sew with the stuffed part to the left of my needle and pin so that I can pull out the pins as I sew.

 

Sewing these required an good bit of man-handling. Just take your time and try to shift the stuffing out of the way of the presser foot as you go. The fabric will occasionally pleat and I don't worry about that at all. The dogs don't seem to be too picky about it.

 

Here's the first section of cells stitched. Fill and sew the second row of cells next.

 

The reason that you left the top 1" of the channels unsewn is so that you can fold the top edges to the inside for finishing. Fill this last row in the same way but fold the top edges in about 1/2" and pin the channels closed as you fill the last 3 chambers.

 

Topstitch the bed closed and you are done! That big bag of stuffing at the beginning of the post was just enough to fill two 26" square beds. They are pretty heavy but I hear that the dogs love them.